


Off the Record

by LittleRaven



Category: Xena: Warrior Princess
Genre: Angst, Domestic, Domestic Fluff, Episode Related, Episode Tag, Episode: s04e03 A Family Affair, F/F, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Missing Scene, Post-Episode: s04e03 A Family Affair
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-22
Updated: 2019-10-22
Packaged: 2020-12-28 03:34:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21130091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRaven/pseuds/LittleRaven
Summary: During her first night back on the road with Xena, Gabrielle works some things out.





	Off the Record

**Author's Note:**

  * For [klutzy_girl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/klutzy_girl/gifts).

Gabrielle hummed, reading the last words on her scroll. She was glad to see Xena had kept her things. 

“You would’ve kicked up a fuss if I hadn’t.”

“I would’ve kicked a lot more than that.” She smiled, opting to let it soften the words rather than leaning into their bravado. “Thank you, Xena.”

A moment of eye contact--if an eternity could be held in a moment, this would be what had happened, and Gabrielle made a note to herself to include tonight in a scroll, so she could record that line for posterity--and then Xena was back to cleaning her sword, Gabrielle to musing over the parchment.

She’d already written down all she remembered concerning her death. The confrontation with Hope and Callisto, the fire of Dahak, as close as the fire a few feet away from where she now sat. She’d hated it, all of it; normally she couldn’t brood like Xena did, unproductive as it was for her, but every second spent on getting out of that fire burned in her mind, even after she’d gotten out. Her head pounded with the memory of her daughter in her arms, the first and the last time melded together. Soft skin, and if she hadn’t felt the heat as they fell she might have forgotten who she held, all the rest of who they were to each other. Enemy and victim. She knew Hope would share the sentiment, and Gabrielle wouldn’t be able to tell which one of them was right. 

She told the parchment instead. It was rough under her skin, as always, a bit gritty from constant travel and now lack of use. Gabrielle revelled in the familiar texture, the sound of light crinkling as she unrolled it, releasing its scent. Then she wrote. 

Gabrielle had hesitated at first. The joy wore off as she stared at her habitual tools, which had given her a way out of her peasant life back when a weapon couldn’t. How to put into words what had held her in its grip since the day she’d first learned to shed blood? She’d had trouble even telling Xena about it, let alone recording it. 

She’d felt Xena’s eyes on her. Without looking back, she’d made herself add a letter. A deep breath had followed, which she’d tried to make as inaudible as possible. Gabrielle had wanted to cross that letter out, scrub at the ink to make it an unrecognizable blur. It hadn’t seemed possible to say anything, to even know what she had to say. Maybe she hadn’t; she still wasn’t sure. Her opinions hadn’t been worth much when it came to all that had happened. Only that last action, throwing herself into the pit, had mattered. 

Maybe the story didn’t need to have opinions this time, Gabrielle had decided in the end. Just the facts. Xena and Gabrielle set off for what they thought would be one thing, and instead was something else. Xena did this. Gabrielle did that. This happened after that. She was careful to tell things in chronological order, apart from the ominous beginning to warn the reader: do not be caught unawares, as we were. The temptation to use flowery words and metaphors never appeared. 

The words looked so unthreatening under her hands. A whole life distilled in front of her. Now she was living in another one. 

Gabrielle realized, then, what she had done. Her scrolls were meant to be a record of their journeys, yes. Her travels with Xena. Yet the scroll she held told a different story. It was almost as if the concept had become a frame, and something else altogether had sprung to fill it. Her story. Her emotions, all the things she still couldn’t wholly share with Xena, despite them living it together--she remembered even now how despite being in the same place, she’d felt as if Xena was far away. 

Xena had told her, once, to write a story about someone else. About herself. Gabrielle wasn’t sure if anybody would want to read this one. She wasn’t sure she would be willing to let people know there was something to read. 

Her shoulders slumped. She hadn’t done anything about what happened, really. She’d set down all the facts, but they made no meaning, and Gabrielle was in no mood to create one. Her life just wasn’t full of it. That was why she’d set out to tell someone else’s story, after all. She’d hoped that being with Xena would rub just a little bit of greater meaning into her life, make it count; and she’d wanted too, to make herself count to Xena, to matter in that great life she was recording. 

She knew she did. Of course. But it wouldn’t hurt her to hear more about it. She turned to face Xena, then backed off halfway, looking down toward the soil at their feet. Gabrielle wished, not for the first time, that she knew how to be more subtle around her. The only thing which saved her, sometimes, was Xena being oblivious--and she never felt that to be a blessing when it happened. 

It was just as embarrasing now as it had ever been, Gabrielle realized as she heard Xena respond to the gesture, putting away her sword and the cleaning rag to look at her more openly. At least it saved her the effort of doing it herself. 

She’d done it before. Be intimate. Life on the road was nothing if not physical, even more so than being a peasant—there was something about the lack of barriers. No walls, no separate rooms. No beds. Just a sleeping roll you could lay wherever you found best. Gabrielle had always found being next to Xena best. 

It was safer, she said the first night. She was just a peasant girl, better at talking than fighting until she learned how. Wasn’t it better to stay closer, so she couldn’t get snatched in the night? 

She was sure Xena would be able to sense anyone coming before they got to the campsite. She was sure, looking at her face, that Xena knew she was sure. But there was no objection, verbal or nonverbal, and it pleased her to take advantage. She wondered how Xena used to sleep, with a whole army following her. She would have had lovers, certainly; there were stories about that too, though back in her village Gabrielle was supposed to pretend she’d never heard them. Did they stay through the night? Did she ever just sleep with her warriors, not for sex but for the pleasure of companionship in a life which must have been hard, for all they had chosen it? Or were they too bloodthirsty and untrusting to even think of it? Would there ever have been someone like her nearby? 

As it was then, so it was most nights. Xena would pick out a spot, and Gabrielle would make her place next to it, before contributing to make the whole site. Sometimes she’d follow Xena, curious to see how she hunted and fished; Gabrielle understood food preparation, but she was curious to learn how to do what came before you skinned the rabbit or gutted the fish. It was gory, she concluded, but not nearly as much as the job she took upon herself once the animal was dead. 

There were times when it was Xena who would come to her. Gabrielle had smiled hugely on the first of these occasions, but bit her tongue. They didn’t have to say anything. She’d been happy. 

This was one of those times, she remembered suddenly. Gabrielle had plunked down first, and Xena had followed. Only she’d forgotten to smile, maybe, and it had been a sign to her companion long before Gabrielle’s hesitant attempt to have a talk with her. Her stomach tensed. It felt good, of course it felt good, to notice Xena paying attention, but it was also making her mouth dry. All she’d been through, all they’d been through, and she wasn’t prepared to talk. Her, unprepared to talk. If she lost her blood innocence that first day, when Hope was conceived, and her relationship with Xena—almost permanently—the next time Hope surprised them in their travels, what had she lost when killing her daughter for the second time? 

Did Xena used to be a talker, before she chose to defend her village and descend into being a warlord? She was starting to understand the temptation to brood. 

“I preferred action. But I knew words had a certain value. Sometimes they’re needed.” Xena’s voice was low, words measured as she looked at her.

Gabrielle had been thinking out loud. Well. At least that much hadn’t changed about her. Not that she was grateful for it at the moment. 

“What did you do while I was gone?”

It seemed the question was as startling to Xena as the beginning of their conversation had been to Gabrielle. For a long moment, she was afraid there might not be an answer yet—and if not now, when? But Xena didn’t look away, and chose to speak. 

“I looked for you.”

A simple sentence carried so much. Gabrielle would never stop marvelling at the power of language. Yet she didn’t spare a thought for writing in her scroll. Maybe history didn’t need that. Maybe she didn’t need history to need that. 

“I told you I was lost, Gabrielle. So I looked for you. I went to Hades. I went to the Amazons, to see their Underworld.”

Xena’s voice was earnest, and it grew softer with her next words. 

“That’s how I knew you were alive. You weren’t there. No god could tell me where you were, and I looked at every spirit.”

“You went to the Underworld. Multiple underworlds. Hades must not have been too happy about that.” 

Gabrielle didn’t know how the Amazon Underworld had responded, but she imagined it wouldn’t have been to cheerful about the living plunging in either. 

“Xena, you didn’t have to. I chose to die.”

It wasn’t a good choice, or a happy one. But it had been one of the few she could make in the situation Dahak had created for her. “There’s no telling what might have happened if I had died, and you tried to bring me back.” 

“I didn’t choose it.” Hardness crept into the words, before ceding to softness once more. “I wanted to protect you, like I didn’t before. I chose you.” 

That simplicity again. It took her breath away. She couldn’t speak. Instead, she reached forward and took Xena’s hands. Remembering how Xena had greeted her before, when they had sat together after the first shock of joy, she took their joined hands to her lips and kissed Xena’s knuckles, one by one. Salty with the day’s travel sweat. Rough. She hadn’t tasted anything this sweet in a lifetime. 

There were no more words after that, simple or no. There was skin, and there were eyes meeting—no matter what else they were doing, they would stop, just for that chance to look, to know they were there, and sometimes Gabrielle felt it was more intimate than any act they could perform. Other times she tried out what her tongue could do, determined to be bold and show Xena how well she had learned from her, and decided nothing brought them closer than the sigh she could bring out of Xena’s mouth. 

They lay there in the quiet of the woods. Gabrielle reached out to slide her fingers over Xena’s hair, brushing it behind her ear. Xena hummed, just a bit, and closed her eyes. 

The world didn’t know that about Xena, she thought. It didn’t know how she looked when she slept, when she tilted her cheek just so against Gabrielle’s fingers. It didn’t know what Gabrielle saw, what she now knew she would get to keep seeing for a while yet. 

There were a lot of things the world didn’t know about either of them, she decided. Little bits of story they got to keep. Maybe, Gabrielle thought as she slid into sleep, they were all the record they could need.


End file.
